Arcturus: A Cloud Overlay Network for Global Accelerator with Enhanced Performance and Stability

TL;DR

Arcturus is a cloud-native global accelerator framework that dynamically leverages multiple cloud providers to enhance performance, reduce costs, and improve stability for real-time applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel two-plane design for flexible, efficient, and scalable global acceleration across heterogeneous cloud resources.

Findings

Outperforms commercial GA services by up to 1.7X in performance

Reduces costs by 71% compared to existing solutions

Maintains over 80% resource efficiency at scale

Abstract

Global Accelerator (GA) services play a vital role in ensuring low-latency, high-reliability communication for real-time interactive applications. However, existing GA offerings are tightly bound to specific cloud providers, resulting in high costs, rigid deployment, and limited flexibility, especially for large-scale or budget-sensitive deployments. Arcturus is a cloud-native GA framework that revisits the design of GA systems by leveraging low-cost, heterogeneous cloud resources across multiple providers. Rather than relying on fixed, high-end infrastructure, Arcturus dynamically constructs its acceleration network and balances performance, stability, and resource efficiency. To achieve this, Arcturus introduces a two-plane design: a forwarding plane that builds a proxy network with adaptive control, and a scheduling plane that coordinates load and routing through lightweight, quantitative optimization. Evaluations under millions of RPS show that Arcturus outperforms commercial GA services by up to 1.7X in acceleration performance, reduces cost by 71%, and maintains over 80% resource efficiency--demonstrating efficient use of cloud resources at scale.